Film teases, "Perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers…"

Welcome to The Multiverse, a new column where'll you'll find Ars' explorations and meditations on the world of science fiction. The Multiverse covers things we love, the things we hate, and the things we do not yet understand from source materials new and old. Send questions, tips, or just say hi to The Multiverse's writers at themultiverse@arstechnica.com.

PLEASE NOTE:We’re going to speculate here about a movie that’s not out yet, gleaning information from the film’s two trailers and its Wikipedia page. We’re not going to be spoiling anything on purpose, but if you want to avoid even inadvertent spoilers or strung-together clues, pull the ejection handle now. This is your only warning!

I have a shameful admission that will probably cost me some geek cred: I disliked Christopher Nolan’s last film, The Dark Knight Rises. It was a crowded mess of a movie, so enslaved by its own structure and so in love with its own plodding sense of foreboding spectacle that I found myself engrossed in Bejeweled on my phone as Bane was blowing up Gotham or whatever. Even my wife, who’s normally so gung-ho about superhero movies, was bored. We turned it off without finishing it.

And so the visceral reaction I had to the teaser trailer for Nolan’s upcoming Interstellar was totally unexpected. It’s been a long time since I got tears in my eyes from a movie trailer, but this one did the trick:

Interstellar teaser.

The starting imagery is incongruous with the narration: a vista of lush crops gives way to dustbowl images from the Great Depression and burning fields as an unseen Matthew McConaughey narrates about overcoming the impossible. After a moment we see images much more suited to the narration—Chuck Yeager’s Glamorous Glennis taking flight, followed by NASA launch footage and shots from within a Gemini capsule, and then footage from the Apollo and shuttle programs.

"But we lost all that," drawls McConaughey sadly over a clip of shuttle Atlantis touching down at KSC for the final time. Next up is darkness, then a dust-covered bookshelf with a toy rocket (or perhaps it’s ash from those burning fields?). We see McConaughey speeding away from a farmhouse in a pickup, and his soft voice offscreen accuses an equally offscreen audience of losing its way.

"Perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers—that we’ve barely begun," he admonishes, "and that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us; that our destiny lies above us." As the music swells, two figures in the foreground hold hands as a distant rocket lifts itself high over a field.

Who has forgotten? Is it us, the actual movie audience, or is it the people of McConaughey’s country or world, wherever and whenever that is?

Exodus

In mid-May, some questions were answered in the movie’s first trailer—we can now infer quite a bit about the film’s setting and first act, though the rest remains shrouded in mystery.

Interstellar trailer.

McConaughey’s character is named "Coop," and he's a pilot and an engineer. He has two children, including a plucky-looking redhead named "Murphy," after "Murphy’s Law." But McConaughey and his engineering and piloting isn’t what the world needs anymore—the world, we learn almost immediately, is starving.

Enlarge/ "We didn’t run out of planes and television sets," the trailer tells us over pictures of ash-shrouded landscapes and burning crops. "We ran out of food."

Paramount/Warner Bros.

To tighten the dramatic noose, we hear what can only be Michael Caine’s voice: "We must confront the reality that nothing in our solar system can help us."

Things begin to come together. There is a plan. Someone—possibly a government, or possibly a rogue research institution or something—has a working spacecraft, and they need McConaughey to fly it.

Following a tearful set of family goodbyes, McConaughey next appears suited up inside the spacecraft, which amidst soaring strings is shown first next to an enormous ringed gas giant and then approaching a warped and distorted lens-like phenomenon.

"[T]he film features a team of space travelers who travel through a wormhole," notes the movie’s Wiki page. As the ship skims closer to the distortion and huge swaths of sky flow beneath like churning white-water rapids made of suns, it becomes clear that this is what we’re seeing—this is a wormhole. And at the music’s crescendo, the ship vanishes into it.

Into unmapped darkness

I’ve watched both trailers many times, and each time I shed a few tears. The why is easy: exploration and discovery are deep and profound human drives. With a modern audience, those drives are most directly tied to NASA and space travel, but the themes of leaving a home behind and flinging oneself into the unknown can be found in human literature and culture for just about as long as there’s been human literature and culture.

The best stories are the simplest, and behind the set and setting of Interstellar we find the outlines of an archetypical hero’s journey—at least, we see the outlines of its first act. But the fact that we’ve seen this story before makes it no less compelling—in fact, in the face of a familiar beginning, the mind leaps to form connections and fill in blanks about what is to come. There are strains of Odysseus woven through McConaughey’s Coop, just as Interstellar echoes strains of Homer’s Odyssey, though he leaves behind a daughter named Murphy instead of a son named Telemachus (in the leaked draft of the script floating around the Internet, "Murphy" is a boy, not a girl). The dying, starving Earth needs an avatar for Coop to save, and what better avatar than his daughter?

But it’s Michael Caine (filling in for Nestor, perhaps?) who sagely delivers the core of the film, gift-wrapped in a sage British accent: "We’re not meant to save the world," he tells us. "We’re meant to leave it."

It’s a freeing explanation. The Earth of Interstellar cannot sustain us, and perhaps it does not even want us anymore. We must go find a new home, and to do so we must leave the cradle and sail on that ocean of black above—a wine-dark sea infinitely more vast than Homer’s Aegean. The journey will be of unknown length, and the chance of success isn’t addressed. It’s implied heavily that as a species we’re doomed if we don’t try.

Enlarge/ The tiny ship against a vast ringed world, like a mote in the eye of a god.

The trailers don’t offer much beyond that; they deal with only the movie’s first act. However, the purpose of the trailers is to generate desire to see the movie, and these two masterfully pluck at the strings of our explorer hearts. They latch onto one of the central facets of humanity—to go and see and find. This drive to learn and know runs deep. It might ultimately find its roots in the fact that every person living must eventually die, and regardless of whether or not one holds with religion and believes in an afterlife, death remains a veil to be lifted only at the end of life (to brutalize Shelley). We ache to know that which we cannot know—it’s baked into our genetics, and we run toward the unknown from the moment we can first crawl under our own power, all as a proxy for our yearning to see behind that veil.

Of course, the globe-spanning information ecology we're building feels sometimes like it takes all the fun out of things—as the philosopher Hans Gruber once famously uttered, "When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer." The borders of our own world are pretty well known now. Even hiking around in whatever woods are near where you live doesn't have the same sense of mystery it used to have before you could fire up Google Earth and see that they do in fact end. We have little outlet for our desire to go and see—it's one of the things that makes movies and television popular.

But there are still vast oceans beneath us and boundless sky above—and those too are things we explore through computers and movies and TV. You don't have to go far on the Web to see every photograph taken by all 12 human beings who walked on the moon, for example. We can slake some of our desires to pierce that veil by gazing through NASA's lens into space, or through other agencies' lenses to peer underwater into the equally terrifying abyss there—but we still venerate those who actually go. What child doesn't want to be an astronaut at some stage? And if the average person now can consult Google and Wikipedia and whatnot, how much more do we envy the few who slip those damned surly bonds?

One of the most eloquent passages ever written about the undeniable, unswerving urge to explore was spoken by former President George W. Bush at the memorial for the space shuttle Columbia’s crew. In front of a crowd of a few hundred people on a warm Houston February day in 2003, the seven astronauts who had been killed were eulogized thus:

This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose—it is a desire written in the human heart. We are that part of creation which seeks to understand all creation. We find the best among us, send them forth into unmapped darkness, and pray they will return. They go in peace for all mankind, and all mankind is in their debt.

Tis not too late to seek a newer world

Behind the Interstellar teaser and trailer lurks the press of that desire—the need to see for ourselves and conquer the overwhelming, threatening, tantalizing unknown. If we set aside the curiosity that drives us beyond horizons, we starve—spiritually and physically. Even though it seems an easier path to turn inward, doing so lessens us. It makes us small.

The trailer closes with the last ship sent by a dying people from a dying Earth vanishing into the unknown—a timeless picture in spite of the sci-fi trappings. It takes a small amount of dramatic hammering to retrofit Tennyson’s "Ulysses" onto the journey. In the small glimpse of Interstellar we’ve been shown, McConaughey’s Coop leaves his uncaring kingdom to his child, and though he may not be the driving force behind the mission to explore beyond the wormhole, he is its catalyst.

The man in the beginning of the trailer is wrong: a spiritually dead people who do not explore, cannot survive. McConaughey’s ship with its mariners leaves the port of our solar system as the warp of space-time puffs their vessel’s sail; though instead of an aged king and his old companions setting out to again to find that which ultimately cannot be found, here it is the human race itself that is old and tired. But there is still within a few of them desire, and will, and a yearning to go out there.

The end of Tennyson's poem’s dovetails with the trailer’s, and my heart leaps to know what happens next.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

150 Reader Comments

Or, as another possibility, perhaps we just haven't yet quite cracked that faster-than-light thingy.

Most people seem to think that we'll just overcome that technologically just like we did with powered flight. I think there is at a minimum many orders of magnitude of difficulty between the two. It's not a failure of will... it's a failure of way.

We deserve to survive, dammit! We survived our atomic age! The whole existential uncertainty about total nuclear war just sidetracked us into obsessive consumerism for a while. Hopefully a couple generations will flush that right out and we can start mining asteroids or the Moon by 2060.

It might, if you have time . The thing about a species facing pressure to survive ("...The world doesn't need engineers. It needs more food...") is that they tend to behave irrationally. If you don't have food, but your neighbor does, you might be inclined to take it. If a world in this state isn't constantly on the brink of war I'd think the film unrealistic.

Transforming Mars will take a lot of effort and a lot of resources the Earth apparently doesn't have. You couldn't migrate enough people to make it pay off fast enough. You'd likely have two planets with insufficient resources instead of just one, as Mars is not self-sustaining. It's not the new Earth that would be needed for humanity to survive.

Inspiring message, although the devil's advocate counter is that there's much about humanity that is in no way admirable, and perhaps it shouldn't expand until it matures, if that's even possible as a species. I'm sure many commenters here have decried the behavior of individuals or government or corporations and they might like to think we would leave the bad behind us if we went up, while suspecting the worst. I don't presonally think we should wait as a species, but I'm sure we'll cause problems elsewhere if we ever make it.

I find the idea of human migration into both the solar system and beyond captivating. However I plainly see that there is no better home than Earth, and our first priority must be to stabilize our impact on this planet, and maintain it's diversification. How can we expect to terraform another body within our solar system if we cannot maintain one that we grew out of? We should protect our planet from ourselves, and exterior extinction threats.

At the same time we should be exploring and expanding, creating a backup, not just for ourselves but for our entire ecosystem. If we can do that within our own solar system, then the possibilities become limitless. I don't expect homo sapiens sapiens to colonize alien plants, but I do think we will create those that do, and that in itself is a noble path worth our efforts.

"We forgot" it seems Nolan, and even Tyson et. al. have forgotten just how much the Apollo program cost, or that what it accomplished beyond "being cool" is getting some dusty rocks.

Make space travel profitable and we'll be launching all over the solar system. That's what caused the mass colonization of "The New World" by Europe hundreds of years ago. Back then giant sailing ships with enough provisions and sailors to the nigh similar length trips into the unknown, and even colonize such, were also fantastically complex and expensive at the time.

But people did it because they expected to make more money back than what they spent. If the same can be done for space travel we'll be in space fast as you can blink. But that doesn't entail sending someone off to Mars just to show it can be done. That entails using private contractors for space missions to build up their infrastructure. Than entails getting behind much cheaper launch options like space elevators. That entails a bunch of "not as sexy as The Eagle has Landed" stuff. But it'll be much, much more effective.

I took my family to Florida and we were lucky to catch STS119, one the later planned STS missions. My youngest son is a shuttle freak - I passed on my love of space and NASA and the shuttles and he grabbed it and ran with it. I made a point of telling the whole family to soak in this experience because the space program as we know it now is coming to and end. I shed a tear when I watched STS135 launch and knew for sure an era had come to a close. The Orion program with its recycled technology and scaled back subcontracting has gutted NASA, having never recovered politically from the losses of Challenger and Columbia and being unable to keep up with the insane mission schedule projected before the Vietnam war swapped space funding for bullets and blood.

My family once again visited Florida this year and we always go to KSC. The new shuttle exhibit is brilliant and breathtaking. But its bittersweet. For all of its celebration of such an incredible human achievement, its juxtaposed by a flatbed trailer outside the main display area that has a rusting Orion escape stage tip - the only display I could find about the future of publically funded space program. It was nothing more than something a grade 12 welding class could have made of scrap steel if scrap steel wasn't so pricey.

There was no future vision, there was no grand followup plan to the shuttle, just this rusted spear sitting on a flatbed with its tires half deflated. I left the kids to go play in the rocket garden so I could find some alone time to deal with my emotions which were strong at this point. I get a lump in my throat just thinking about it.

I understand McConaughey's words in that first trailer. I've been wondering if I'm the only one feeling so incredibly sad for what has happened to the US Space program. NASA and the program were so much more than fire and thunder and some distant event. The shuttle program, ISS and everything related to the space program creates so much secondary value - new materials, new industrial process, scientific accomplishments and discovery of our own world and its place in the universe. But what is worst of all to me that saddens me most is that my children and grandchildren won't have the experience of wonder and awe that I had most of my life watching this amazing organization and people do incredible things. It robs us of the source of wonder and imagination that sparks a childs mind and make us think that anything is possible.

I watched Elon Musk unveil Dragon and felt a little renewed but its not the same. Elon is the P.T. Barnum of space travel now, playing to the desires of shareholders, not the wonderment of a grand plan the way NASA once did. I do have to thank him though, I am hoping his SpaceX program is a success and we find a new way to live those days of wonder again, even if we have to take a commercial break now and again.

Well, it's not impossible. Certainly not the same thing as trying to circumvent (our current understanding of) relativistic physics...but at humanity's current level of technology, they may as well be equally difficult.

In order to terraform Mars and make it habitable, you'd have to increase atmospheric pressure, raise the surface temperature so the water ice melts, and then find a way to keep the atmosphere from being lost to space (because Mars has no magnetosphere which provides protection from solar radiation). Definitely a daunting prospect no matter which way you slice it.

"We’re not meant to save the world," he tells us. "We’re meant to leave it."

Except ... we can't.

Unless we find a way to magically resurrect Mars' magnetosphere and bring its atmosphere back from the dead there's nowhere else for us to go in this Solar System. Where else? Kepler 186f? Ok, tell me how we'll travel 500 light years without some magical hand-wavy 'wormhole'.

We need to face facts: the Earth is all we've got. Maybe, if we survive the next billion years, we'll be able to send out colony ark ships to reseed on distant planets and escape our Sun's own death. But there is never going to be any form of mass transportation to another world. We're stuck here, and so are our children's children all the way down the line. The sooner that we stop fantasising and accept this fact the better it will be for all of us.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't expend a lot of energy finding out about other worlds, not at all. But we do that because we want to know about them, not because we have a hope in hell of visiting them.

"We forgot" it seems Nolan, and even Tyson et. al. have forgotten just how much the Apollo program cost, or that what it accomplished beyond "being cool" is getting some dusty rocks.

Make space travel profitable and we'll be launching all over the solar system. That's what caused the mass colonization of "The New World" by Europe hundreds of years ago. Back then giant sailing ships with enough provisions and sailors to the nigh similar length trips into the unknown, and even colonize such, were also fantastically complex and expensive at the time.

But people did it because they expected to make more money back than what they spent. If the same can be done for space travel we'll be in space fast as you can blink. But that doesn't entail sending someone off to Mars just to show it can be done. That entails using private contractors for space missions to build up their infrastructure. Than entails getting behind much cheaper launch options like space elevators. That entails a bunch of "not as sexy as The Eagle has Landed" stuff. But it'll be much, much more effective.

The what is important, but the how is important. The scientific and engineering benefits of the space program are still yielding fruit.

I watched Elon Musk unveil Dragon and felt a little renewed but its not the same. Elon is the P.T. Barnum of space travel now, playing to the desires of shareholders, not the wonderment of a grand plan the way NASA once did.

SpaceX is a private company, so the shareholders are a relatively small group of people and organizations (very small text at the bottom of this page). All of them had to buy into Elon Musk's long term plan before he accepted their funding, and this kind of arrangement generally leads to a company that can stick to a long term plan better than a publicly-traded company. It's definitely not the same as a government agency that doesn't need to worry about profitability (even in the long term), but it's also not the quarterly-reports-focused type of corporation that you might be thinking of.

"We’re not meant to save the world," he tells us. "We’re meant to leave it."

Except ... we can't.

Unless we find a way to magically resurrect Mars' magnetosphere and bring its atmosphere back from the dead there's nowhere else for us to go in this Solar System. Where else? Kepler 186f? Ok, tell me how we'll travel 500 light years without some magical hand-wavy 'wormhole'.

We need to face facts: the Earth is all we've got. Maybe, if we survive the next billion years, we'll be able to send out colony ark ships to reseed on distant planets and escape our Sun's own death. But there is never going to be any form of mass transportation to another world. We're stuck here, and so are our children's children all the way down the line. The sooner that we stop fantasising and accept this fact the better it will be for all of us.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't expend a lot of energy finding out about other worlds, not at all. But we do that because we want to know about them, not because we have a hope in hell of visiting them.

I disagree about that sort of timeline. By a billion years from now our species - hell our genus, family, and order even - will be long gone. I think we should push out into our own solar system as soon as possible to exploit what resources are there and begin to get our 'sea legs'. Once we have a robust architecture for space travel and survival in that incredibly harsh environment, as well as for the construction of space-worthy vessels in the much less taxing gravity well of our moon, we can begin to turn attention to creating some form of 'backup' for the species on Mars. If we do this I see a real chance for our species to extend our reach to alien suns. It would not be a sure thing, it will not be glamorous; von Neumann probes with the ability to birth children or generation ships, not flashy FTL. But there have always been social groups that wish for isolation and societies hungry for glory and power, and those drives - which have spawned both such evil and such wonder here on Earth - may perhaps be directed towards the stars themselves, not just our familiar compliment of planets.

The point is that it may end up that our successor species claims some of the nearer stars, and likely we will never get more than a few hundred light years from Earth unless we go really nuts with the von Neumann architecture, but if we fail to take the first steps, there is a significant risk that our molestation of the natural order and climate and our endless appetite for non-renewable resources here on our homeworld will stifle any such future attempts before they bear any fruits.

It is true that this means we will eventually have to think on the timescale of our genus when we can't at the moment even think on the timescale of a few lifetimes, let alone our species. But I believe that pushing into our solar system may bring some perspective, catalyzing the drive for such longer-term planning and thought. Who knows, we may never seriously leave our planet. But we have the ability to choose whether or not that is the case, unlike any other species we know of. Programs like SpaceX give me the faintest glimmers of hope that perhaps we will make choices that promote our truly long-term interests.

Well, it's not impossible. Certainly not the same thing as trying to circumvent (our current understanding of) relativistic physics...but at humanity's current level of technology, they may as well be equally difficult.

In order to terraform Mars and make it habitable, you'd have to increase atmospheric pressure, raise the surface temperature so the water ice melts, and then find a way to keep the atmosphere from being lost to space (because Mars has no magnetosphere which provides protection from solar radiation). Definitely a daunting prospect no matter which way you slice it.

Mine tons of radioactive material off moons from Jupiter and Saturn, bury deep undergroud on Mars, core melts and rotational energy gets transferred, causing a magnetosphere. Then engineer a series of cascading organisms to release water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen into Mar's atmosphere. If we start now it may only take more than a century!

Travelling faster than C on the other hand is a theoretical problem, one involving time which is something we're not really sure we understand at all in terms of physics. So assuming it's possible (which is an assumption, admittedly) it may end up being easier than the whole "Mars" thing.

"We’re not meant to save the world," he tells us. "We’re meant to leave it."

Except ... we can't.

Unless we find a way to magically resurrect Mars' magnetosphere and bring its atmosphere back from the dead there's nowhere else for us to go in this Solar System. Where else? Kepler 186f? Ok, tell me how we'll travel 500 light years without some magical hand-wavy 'wormhole'.

We need to face facts: the Earth is all we've got.

Absolutely. But there's no need to colonize Mars, or any other planet, for that matter. As Gerard O'Neill pointed out, Mars is an unfounded assumption that goes like this:

1. We need to get our eggs out of one basket...2. Therefore we should go to Mars, terraform it, somehow increase its gravitational pull, and colonize it.

There's an easier solution. Begin with a tether 893 meters long (steel or composite, an off the shelf item) and attach a canister to either end. Now spin it up so you have 1G gravity. You've built the first 1G space habitat. Add water for radiation shielding, and now you can stay indefinitely. Build your first machine shop using off-the-shelf machine tools designed for Earth gravity - no need for custom-built hardware. Voila, l'outpost.

Direct asteroids toward your new station, 500 tons or more at a time. Almost every material on Earth is already up there and available, in quantities much larger than you could feasibly bring up with rockets.

Use the material to build your first cylinder station, 893 meters in diameter on the inside and maybe a kilometer in length, with a mirror at the end (or each end) to direct sunlight inward. Cover the interior surface with 2 meters or more of asteroid material.

Your new space colony is about 693 acres, or roughly a square mile, with radiation shielding, 1G gravity and most importantly, no gravity well to get in and out of. It's as close to Earth as you want to make it and straightforward to supply with whatever it can't produce on its own, which shouldn't be all that much.

Rinse and repeat, scaling up when it's feasible. See "The High Frontier" for more details.

"We’re not meant to save the world," he tells us. "We’re meant to leave it."

Except ... we can't.

[...]

We need to face facts: the Earth is all we've got. Maybe, if we survive the next billion years, we'll be able to send out colony ark ships to reseed on distant planets and escape our Sun's own death. But there is never going to be any form of mass transportation to another world. We're stuck here, and so are our children's children all the way down the line. The sooner that we stop fantasising and accept this fact the better it will be for all of us.

"We’re not meant to save the world," he tells us. "We’re meant to leave it."

Except ... we can't.

Unless we find a way to magically resurrect Mars' magnetosphere and bring its atmosphere back from the dead there's nowhere else for us to go in this Solar System. Where else? Kepler 186f? Ok, tell me how we'll travel 500 light years without some magical hand-wavy 'wormhole'.

We need to face facts: the Earth is all we've got. Maybe, if we survive the next billion years, we'll be able to send out colony ark ships to reseed on distant planets and escape our Sun's own death. But there is never going to be any form of mass transportation to another world. We're stuck here, and so are our children's children all the way down the line. The sooner that we stop fantasising and accept this fact the better it will be for all of us.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't expend a lot of energy finding out about other worlds, not at all. But we do that because we want to know about them, not because we have a hope in hell of visiting them.

I disagree about that sort of timeline. By a billion years from now our species - hell our genus, family, and order even - will be long gone. I think we should push out into our own solar system as soon as possible to exploit what resources are there and begin to get our 'sea legs'. Once we have a robust architecture for space travel and survival in that incredibly harsh environment, as well as for the construction of space-worthy vessels in the much less taxing gravity well of our moon, we can begin to turn attention to creating some form of 'backup' for the species on Mars.

How? Sure, we can work out ways to allow tiny colonies to survive with constant resupply from Earth. But that's it until we develop some radical new technologies. Maybe it would be possible to find a way to inject energy into Mars' core and spin up its iron again. Maybe it would be possible to inject enough gas from elsewhere in the solar system to recreate its atmosphere. These are massive projects that would only become remotely feasible hundreds of years in the future when we have access to levels of energy that are orders of magnitude higher than anything we can muster now. Terraforming Mars would take fantastic amounts of wealth and might be a worthwhile project if we're looking for something to do a thousand years from now. It's not a survival strategy.

Quote:

If we do this I see a real chance for our species to extend our reach to alien suns. It would not be a sure thing, it will not be glamorous; von Neumann probes with the ability to birth children or generation ships, not flashy FTL. But there have always been social groups that wish for isolation and societies hungry for glory and power, and those drives - which have spawned both such evil and such wonder here on Earth - may perhaps be directed towards the stars themselves, not just our familiar compliment of planets.

The point is that it may end up that our successor species claims some of the nearer stars, and likely we will never get more than a few hundred light years from Earth unless we go really nuts with the von Neumann architecture, but if we fail to take the first steps, there is a significant risk that our molestation of the natural order and climate and our endless appetite for non-renewable resources here on our homeworld will stifle any such future attempts before they bear any fruits

Long-term colony ships are the only hope the human race has of ever spreading elsewhere. But the fact is that they're going to consist of relatively tiny genetically-selected seed populations. And if a colony does succeed, it's going to be on its own, with round-trip communication of several hundred years. It might make us feel better to know that there are humans somewhere else, but we're going to be on our own as much as ever. Again, colony ships are a luxury project, not a survival strategy (except in the most abstract sense).

I've read as much science-fiction as anyone else here, and I can understand why people get pissed-off at an injection of realism. But just wanting something doesn't make it happen. And the fact is that we're never going to have a pan-galactic federation with interstellar travel times of a week or two. If we want to survive as a species we're going to have to survive here, nowhere else. The Earth should be good for another billion years, we just have to make sure we don't mess it up. The best chance we have of surviving lies in making sure we don't screw up the fantastic gift we have sitting right in front of us.

My advice would be to try reading some science with your science-fiction. The more you learn about astronomy, the more you'll realise how lucky we are, because the universe in general is very, very hostile to our form of life. Our future doesn't lie in space, because space is a really nasty place.

None of this means that we shouldn't keep finding out about the universe around us. We need to keep spending money on space because we want to know about it, not because we're ever actually going to live there. I have no sympathy for the lackwits who fail to understand the importance of sheer curiosity, but I see no need to appease their stupidity by inventing fables.

Your new space colony is about 693 acres, or roughly a square mile, with radiation shielding, 1G gravity and most importantly, no gravity well to get in and out of. It's as close to Earth as you want to make it and straightforward to supply with whatever it can't produce on its own, which shouldn't be all that much.

Rinse and repeat, scaling up when it's feasible. See "The High Frontier" for more details.

Again, a luxury project, but not a survival strategy. How many people are you going to fit in one square mile? And how much is it going to cost to make? If it were just a question of 'rinse and repeat' we'd currently be launching Apollo 152.

I suppose a space habitat might be an option if global wealth inequality reaches extreme levels and a wealthy subsection of the population decides it wants to escape the mess they've created. I can't say I really think much of the idea of a space bolt-hole for the super-rich.

A survival strategy means survival for everyone. That means a platform that can support billions of people. And that really means planet-sized habitats. Terraforming Mars presents a massive engineering problem, especially in terms of getting its core to spin up again. But I think it would end up being a better option than trying to create enough habitat-space for a few billion people. Of course, the best option is to make sure we don't need to worry about that nonsense and don't screw with what we've got already.

I have a shameful admission that will probably cost me some geek cred: I disliked Christopher Nolan’s last film, The Dark Knight Rises.

Cost you some geek cred? Heck no... it's exactly the opposite: your cred goes up in my eyes. I enjoyed the first two Dark Knight movies but couldn't stand the last one. It was a big mess like you point out, and I hated its version of Bane.

"We’re not meant to save the world," he tells us. "We’re meant to leave it."

Except ... we can't.

Unless we find a way to magically resurrect Mars' magnetosphere and bring its atmosphere back from the dead there's nowhere else for us to go in this Solar System. Where else? Kepler 186f? Ok, tell me how we'll travel 500 light years without some magical hand-wavy 'wormhole'.

We need to face facts: the Earth is all we've got. Maybe, if we survive the next billion years, we'll be able to send out colony ark ships to reseed on distant planets and escape our Sun's own death. But there is never going to be any form of mass transportation to another world. We're stuck here, and so are our children's children all the way down the line. The sooner that we stop fantasising and accept this fact the better it will be for all of us.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't expend a lot of energy finding out about other worlds, not at all. But we do that because we want to know about them, not because we have a hope in hell of visiting them.

I disagree about that sort of timeline. By a billion years from now our species - hell our genus, family, and order even - will be long gone. I think we should push out into our own solar system as soon as possible to exploit what resources are there and begin to get our 'sea legs'. Once we have a robust architecture for space travel and survival in that incredibly harsh environment, as well as for the construction of space-worthy vessels in the much less taxing gravity well of our moon, we can begin to turn attention to creating some form of 'backup' for the species on Mars.

How? Sure, we can work out ways to allow tiny colonies to survive with constant resupply from Earth. But that's it until we develop some radical new technologies. Maybe it would be possible to find a way to inject energy into Mars' core and spin up its iron again. Maybe it would be possible to inject enough gas from elsewhere in the solar system to recreate its atmosphere. These are massive projects that would only become remotely feasible hundreds of years in the future when we have access to levels of energy that are orders of magnitude higher than anything we can muster now. Terraforming Mars would take fantastic amounts of wealth and might be a worthwhile project if we're looking for something to do a thousand years from now. It's not a survival strategy.

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If we do this I see a real chance for our species to extend our reach to alien suns. It would not be a sure thing, it will not be glamorous; von Neumann probes with the ability to birth children or generation ships, not flashy FTL. But there have always been social groups that wish for isolation and societies hungry for glory and power, and those drives - which have spawned both such evil and such wonder here on Earth - may perhaps be directed towards the stars themselves, not just our familiar compliment of planets.

The point is that it may end up that our successor species claims some of the nearer stars, and likely we will never get more than a few hundred light years from Earth unless we go really nuts with the von Neumann architecture, but if we fail to take the first steps, there is a significant risk that our molestation of the natural order and climate and our endless appetite for non-renewable resources here on our homeworld will stifle any such future attempts before they bear any fruits

Long-term colony ships are the only hope the human race has of ever spreading elsewhere. But the fact is that they're going to consist of relatively tiny genetically-selected seed populations. And if a colony does succeed, it's going to be on its own, with round-trip communication of several hundred years. It might make us feel better to know that there are humans somewhere else, but we're going to be on our own as much as ever. Again, colony ships are a luxury project, not a survival strategy (except in the most abstract sense).

I've read as much science-fiction as anyone else here, and I can understand why people get pissed-off at an injection of realism. But just wanting something doesn't make it happen. And the fact is that we're never going to have a pan-galactic federation with interstellar travel times of a week or two. If we want to survive as a species we're going to have to survive here, nowhere else. The Earth should be good for another billion years, we just have to make sure we don't mess it up. The best chance we have of surviving lies in making sure we don't screw up the fantastic gift we have sitting right in front of us.

My advice would be to try reading some science with your science-fiction. The more you learn about astronomy, the more you'll realise how lucky we are, because the universe in general is very, very hostile to our form of life. Our future doesn't lie in space, because space is a really nasty place.

None of this means that we shouldn't keep finding out about the universe around us. We need to keep spending money on space because we want to know about it, not because we're ever actually going to live there. I have no sympathy for the lackwits who fail to understand the importance of sheer curiosity, but I see no need to appease their stupidity by inventing fables.

Bit small minded isn't it? I say it often but 150 years ago we didn't have motors, cars, planes, hell not even widely available electricity. 300 years ago we were killing each other with spears and burned witches.

Give us another 150 years and we have hopefully fusion power. I.e. as much energy as we would want. Who needs the sun if you can build your own? 300 years from now we will have automated facilities that can create pretty much anything we want. 450 years from now we might have factories that can churn out as many ships, space stations etc. as we could imagine and with unlimited energy from fusion there are no real limits on food supply or whatever. Give us a thousand years and we can perhaps BUILD planets. or space stations the size of moons. Who needs interstellar travel if you can freaking build your own planets. And if our sun ever gives up we we should be able to reach the next stars in a couple thousand years. And it wouldn't be a small genetically inbred crew. We could take half a planet with us.

And if I am of by an order of magnitude so be it. Perhaps its 10000 years into the future. But let's phase it as long as we do not bomb ourselves into extinction, or find a virus that does it or let robots kill us we will be infecting the galaxy pretty soon. "Soon not being in our lifetime of course".

"We’re not meant to save the world," he tells us. "We’re meant to leave it."

Except ... we can't.

Unless we find a way to magically resurrect Mars' magnetosphere and bring its atmosphere back from the dead there's nowhere else for us to go in this Solar System. Where else? Kepler 186f? Ok, tell me how we'll travel 500 light years without some magical hand-wavy 'wormhole'.

We need to face facts: the Earth is all we've got. Maybe, if we survive the next billion years, we'll be able to send out colony ark ships to reseed on distant planets and escape our Sun's own death. But there is never going to be any form of mass transportation to another world. We're stuck here, and so are our children's children all the way down the line. The sooner that we stop fantasising and accept this fact the better it will be for all of us.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't expend a lot of energy finding out about other worlds, not at all. But we do that because we want to know about them, not because we have a hope in hell of visiting them.

Maybe maybe not, however the attitude that maybe the Earth is all we got, may motivate us to clean up our act instead of trying to find some theoretical out, that means we can put off our problems for another day.

His Batman films were a joke, his last action film (Inception) was meh, and he's so overrated it hurts.

That being said - he's not a bad director. Just way overrated (way better than garbage like Bay or Sommers). I'm hoping he can do something original that defines him as a director (like a James Hetfeild or Dave Mustaine in rock). If this film is it - I'm there! I want to be there to see his grand overture (if this is it).

When you tied it into Tennyson's Ulysses, the reference made sense, but until that point, I kept thinking the Odysseus reference was rather against the point of the "drive to explore the unknown" theme. While Odysseus did travel far and explore, he was more like Quantum Leap's Sam Beckett, "hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home." Odysseus's journey was inward-seeking. He was the reluctant explorer. His quest was to return to his wife and family.

I'm not saying the drive to explore isn't an important one in the human narrative. I'm just saying you may want to find a better example - one that doesn't run almost counter to your main premise.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.